Many persons of reduced physical capability are confined to wheelchairs and more and more areas are being made accessible to wheelchairs. The wheelchair itself has been reduced to a fairly standardized design and most innovations in this area are in the form of complementary attachments to such a wheelchair. A commonly encountered difficulty with the standard wheelchair is its inability to traverse narrow or confined passages. Although several attempts have been made to provide attachments which will selectively reduce the width of a wheelchair, the problem has not been economically and reliably met in the prior art. Previous attachments for this purpose suffer from an inability to be operated while the chair is occupied or by persons with reduced physical capacity.
The typical wheelchair consists of a pair of rigid side frames joined together by pivoted cross braces and having a flexible back and seat so that the chair an be collapsed into a fairly compact package for storage or transport when not in use. Some of the prior art has focused on holding the chair in a partially collapsed position to reduce its width with the adjustments to the chair width having to be made with the chair unoccupied. Other attempts to avail the user of a variable width wheelchair require operations from portions of the chair difficult for the occupant to reach, or require excessive force to operate while a user occupies the chair, or require a counterproductive opposed force relationship between the user and the operating attachment. This opposed force relationship may be seen in instances in which the user pulls up on a lever to lift the seat and partially collapse the chair thereby forcing himself downward on the very seat which he is attempting to lift upwards.